text: It is worth noting that there are not many kinetically perfect enzymes. This can be explained in terms of natural selection. An increase in catalytic speed may be favoured as it could confer some advantage to the organism. However, when the catalytic speed outstrips diffusion speed (i.e. substrates entering and leaving the active site, and also encountering substrates) there is no more advantage to increase the speed even further. The diffusion limit represents an absolute physical constraint on evolution. Increasing the catalytic speed past the diffusion speed will not aid the organism in any way and so represents a global maximum in a fitness landscape. Therefore, these perfect enzymes must have come about by lucky random mutation which happened to spread, or because the faster speed was once useful as part of a different reaction in the enzyme's ancestry.